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Children's ability to express thoughts, ideas, and needs is vital to their full participation in a democratic society. In the preschool environment, multiple opportunities to engage in emergent literacy practices may stimulate this ability. The study used an ecological development approach to investigate the language environment in Swedish preschools, focusing on the relationships among seven classroom quality dimensions. Children's engagement was measured by observing their active participation in emergent literacy practices. The results showed that positive climate, instructional learning formats and language modeling were the most significant contributors to engagement in emergent literacy practices. To conclude, children's engagement in emergent literacy practices seems to benefit from a positive climate and needs and uses instructional discussions and activities in the everyday situations in preschool. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Child engagement has been defined as active participation in classroom routines, appropriate interactions with the environment and it also predicts academic achievement. Therefore, it is necessary to identify predictors of engagement over time. Moreover, cross-cultural data is needed to provide a global picture of the quality of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) across countries. This study aims to describe the quality of Swedish preschool classrooms and its relationship with students’ engagement over time. Data was collected from 165 preschool teachers in 55 preschool units in Sweden. Results show that all classroom-related variables (Emotional Support, Instructional Support and Classroom Organisation) have increased levels over time, while engagement remained stable. Three groups of preschool classroom units were identified with similar patterns of classroom quality over time (higher emotional support and lower instructional practice) and similar differences in level. Emotional Support was found to be the best predictor of student engagement over time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of this study was to develop and evaluate an instrument - the Responsive Augmentative and Alternative Communication Style (RAACS) scale Version 2 - to assess the communicative style of parents as they interact with their children using augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). This scale was used to analyze play interactions between 43 parents and 28 children with different diagnoses (including Down syndrome, autism, cerebral palsy, and intellectual disability), aged between 12 and 60 months. Parent-child interactions were observed both before and after parent participation in ComAlong, a training course on using responsive communication and AAC to support interaction with children. Based on an analysis of the results, Version 3 of the RAACS scale was developed and is recommended for future use. Analyses of Version 3 showed acceptable inter- and intra-coder reliability, and excellent internal consistency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores practical experiences of model-based development and implementation, focusing on 'lessons identified.' The study draws on experience from several case studies in the Swedish Defence domain using semistructured interviews as the major source of information. The study identifies several conditions as being crucial for successful implementation of model-based development work, including an increased focus on the planning and premodeling phase, a need for interorganizational or across-project collaboration, scalability, change management, and documentation and reuse of experiences. It was also found that most of the challenges identified in the model-based development and implementation processes are common organizational and system development related problems such as change management, the issue of user participation, and how to carry out requirements engineering based on the models. Therefore, future research in the area should aim for a more integrative perspective, for instance, bridging the gap between information collection, models, user needs, and organizational and system requirements. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Eng 15 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a method for creating a comparable text corpus from two document collections in different languages. The collections can be very different in origin. In this study, we build a comparable corpus from articles by a Swedish news agency and a U.S. newspaper. The keys with best resolution power were extracted from the documents of one collection, the source collection, by using the relative average term frequency (RATF) value. The keys were translated into the language of the other collection, the target collection, with a dictionary-based query translation program. The translated queries were run against the target collection and an alignment pair was made if the retrieved documents matched given date and similarity score criteria. The resulting comparable collection was used as a similarity thesaurus to translate queries along with a dictionary-based translator. The combined approaches outperformed translation schemes where dictionary-based translation or corpus translation was used alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]